How to Avoid Being in a Construction Accident When it Occurs

Updated on July 18, 2011

A
construction accident will happen to you if you work in the construction
industry long enough. This may sound dramatic, but the truth is that the
construction industry is amongst the most dangerous civilian occupations to
work in. While advances in safety, technology, procedures, legislation and
compensation have reduced the occurrence and impact of fatalities within the
industry, they do still occur.

While death
is a serious risk on a construction site, it no longer presents the most
significant risk. The largest risk for construction workers presently is injury.
An injury from work can not only have serious repercussions for your own long
term health, but can also have severe financial & relationship implications.

3 Steps to Avoid a Construction Accident

Like the
saying goes, “prevention is better than cure,” and it holds as true for the
construction industry as any other. The more time and effort you devote to
avoiding a construction accident, the better positioned you will be to survive.

It doesn’t
have to be difficult though. There are three things you need to do – and
they’re really quite simple. These are the principles behind most of the
occupational health & safety legislation and procedures that cover working
on construction sites.

While the
complexity of much of this legislation has left a bad taste in the mouth of
many construction industry professionals, if you follow these three principles
you can hardly go wrong:

1. Know the Difference Between a Hazard
and a Risk

Construction
work is inherently risky. The aim of all risk mitigation and safety procedures
should not be to eliminate risk entirely – for this is impossible – but to
manage the risks that are present, and ensure that the inevitable hazards of a
construction site do not drift into an area of unreasonable risk.

The key
here is to understand the difference between a hazard and a risk. The two sound the same, but are in fact very
different in their meaning. Understanding this difference can have a big impact
on your ability to avoid a construction accident.

A hazard is something that can go wrong. You walk onto a building site and
notice that a team of roofing contractors is working on a roof laying large clay
roofing tiles directly above a team of carpenters who are below. There is no
net below the roofing team to catch falling debris or tools. Also, the roofing
team are not using harnesses – if they were to slip and fall, nothing would
break their fall except for the ground below. In this case the hazard is the
roofing tiles and the roofing team. They present a hazard to themselves and
those working below. Tiles may fall and strike a worker below. One of the
roofers may fall and injure themselves or another that they fall on. Will this
actually happen? More often than not, no. But
that’s the nature of accidents – an unexpected event in an unforeseen
circumstance.

A risk is the chance that something will go
wrong. If a hazard represents
something that can go wrong, a risk is the likelihood that it will. Take the
example above. You may decide that, although the factors described above do
represent a hazard, that the risk of anything bad actually happening is
insufficient to warrant any special preventative measures. Which is fine.
Depending on where you live in the world, sometimes this will be all that is required
of you, provided you can show documentary evidence that it has been done. Now,
imagine it has begun to rain on the same construction site. Does the rain
increase the chance that something will go wrong? Almost certainly. Working at height
without harnesses on a slippery surface is a recipe for disaster. The key is to
know the difference between a hazard and a risk, and to realise that the
conditions on a construction site are dynamic – the risk levels can change all
of the time.

One measures the severity of a danger. The
other measures the probability that it will occur.

A
construction accident occurs where the hazard of a particular activity is
significant enough to cause injury, and the risk is high enough that it will be
more likely to happen than not.

This is a risk matrix. Graphically representing hazard and risk can help demonstrate the relationship between them.

2. Identify the Hazards,
Manage the Risks

Half of health and safety on a building site is
taking the time to identify the dangers and what can go wrong. It doesn’t have
to take long, and is the single most important part of health and safety – even
more than personal protective equipment.

Knowing the difference between a hazard and a
risk, you need first to identify all of the potential hazards on your site. An
effective way to do this is at the beginning of a work day. It doesn’t have to
take long – assemble your team and take a quick walk around the site. Get as
many opinions as you can on what constitutes a genuine danger to you as a
worker. If you see something, rectify it immediately if practical or discuss as
a group the best way to mitigate the risk.

3. Learn & Use Manual
Lifting Techniques

A good tradesperson will spend considerable
time and money amassing high quality tools and then caring for them. How ironic
then, that the same people generally neglect the single most important,
expensive and irreplaceable tool they have: their body.

Tools can be replaced – your health cannot.

The single activity which consumes most of your
time as a tradesperson is manual handling of goods, materials and tools. It is
unavoidable that you will be forced to use your body to lift, move, shove or
hold large amounts of weight in awkward positions while working in the
construction industry.

To avoid injury in this manner you need to
familiarise yourself with manual handling techniques.

Health and safety on a construction site does
not have to be complicated. Avoiding a construction accident is, in reality, as
simple as adopting and following these three tips.

Do yourself and your family a favour, and
implement them next time you’re on site.

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